Today I discovered why I have been having a few compatibility problems with my Playstation interface code.
The PSX uses a SPI bus. The device is supposed to put data on the bus when there is a high to low transition, then read the command on the low to high change. Sure enough the official controller sets the data line within 0.3us of the clock transition.
The problem is that some revisions of the PSX hardware don’t wait for the low to high transition to read the data line. They read at some random point during the clock cycle.
It seems to be some kind of bug because Sony fixed it in later revisions. That is of course assuming that the information on the net about the controller protocol is correct. It may be that the controller is supposed to assert the data line within a few hundred nanoseconds but that seems somewhat unlikely. It would force you to use a hardware SPI bus and thus limit the choice of microcontroller. Maybe Sony don’t care about the needs of third party developers…
I saw a PSX dev-kit for sale last year and wish I had it now. Oh well, it’s sorted now. Make sure the data is there before the transition, just like the PSX does with the command line, and it works.
Anyway,
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